I waited a few days for the media excitement to die down and the headlines to fade over the statements by the General President about immigration policy. I preferred to sniff out the reactions, read between the lines, question, wonder, before developing an article worthy of such a sensitive and core issue. Cuban immigration policy is not just one more issue. It is, in my opinion, one of the cornerstones of the indefensible, a caveman-worthy backwardness that the Island has suffered over the last half century. For those who sidestep the issue and for those who confront it, it becomes a matter of the greatest interest to Cubans on whatever shore.

So, to know that Raul Castro is immersed in reviews about how Cubans enter and leave their country; to hear it affirmed that certain practices that have unnecessarily endured over tie will be modified; and to suspect they are preparing the ground for the return of “other” exiles, seemed to me — and now, at a distance of some days, still seems to me — some of the most important news that has come out of Cuba in a long time. And I’m not one for handing out swift hurrahs.

Why does this announcement seem important to me? First, because I can’t imagine that another update  could inject itself into Cuban immigration policy to make it more viable, more likely, that they wouldn’t eliminate the Jurassic “white card” (exit permit) that has cost Cuba politically so much over the decades.

And second, because every time I now hear “simple economic migrants” could return to Cuba any time they wanted, the affirmation of the General President that almost all preserve their love for their family and for their country, it only leads me to one conclusion: to eliminate the prohibition that weighs over hundreds of thousands of exiles, because they escaped on a raft, or because they don’t sympathize politically with the regime, they have been deprived of the right to visit their family.

And if this finally happens, if agonizing and trembling, they eliminate much of these unjustifiable barriers to entry and exit, I think the government of the Island would pose a new scenario worthy of attention, at least on the part of honest critics. I discount in advance those on both sides who fatten their pockets on the conflict; those who make political hay from the alienation; and those whose brains boil with hatred that prevents them from looking at events through the right lens.

Even if at a glacial pace, has there been movement in the country in the last five years or not, the five years of the younger brother’s mandate? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s three times that of what the firstborn allowed.

For me, to vaporize prohibitions that never should have existed, such as those concerning cell phones, DVDs, Cubans being able to enter hotels; to begin to decentralize the economy (with more setbacks than successes, with more stumbles than firm steps, but at least with a philosophy that embraces anti-statism); to accept publicly and clearly that the number one enemy of the country is not “the Empire that blockades us,” but corruption, inefficiency, and the illegalities entrenched in society;and above all: to empty the prisons of the considerable number of political prisoners who, after we checked, were not really exiles (those who demanded to remain in their country); are, for me, reasonable evidence that Cuba is moving. That the floor is shifting, becoming more nuanced, giving birth to a perspective that didn’t exist until recently, and that, whether we like it or not, accept the obvious or not, is the pragmatic younger brother reaching out a hand.

If, then, a new horizon appears, I think the table is set to ask ourselves: Is Raul Castro placing his bets on this side of the network? Are we looking at a picture that is usable, necessary, useful, or should we ignore it because we are done with deceptive illusions?

Personally, I don’t think there is an overly altruistic will behind these reforms. A country bled by hunger, by the restrictions, by tax practices, by stifling bureaucracy, is not the work of chance or of the embargo: it is the result of mismanagement that has lasted for over five decades. And Raul knows it. And he also knows, that if in some way he tries to contain, delay or prevent the thunderous collapse of a model introduced with blood and fire, it’s necessary to grease the wheels. To “de-ideologize” the workings of a country where even the orgasms have socialist spasms.

Far from the idyllic epics of Fidel Castro; possessor of a well-known pragmatism, and perhaps more given to the efficiency than the caudillo who, instead of dedicating his hours to thinking about how to make the country more habitable, employed them in Guinness Book of Records speeches, Raul Castro has started to drop the dead weight.

And because of this, following the same logic, it seems to me that the disappearance of the cynical and sinister Exit Permit, together with the possibility of return for many who until now could not do so, are more than reasonable: they are imminent measures.

Will the ailing Cuban economy miss the 150 CUC cost of each “white card,” as the exit permit is known? Earlier we formulated another question: Why are Cubans “left” in other countries? Simple: Because of the complexity of traveling to Cuba is such that you never know if you can do it again. With every Cuban who works a few months in the Netherlands, Chile or Ecuador, and does not return to the Island, the national economy loses important influxes of foreign capital. But I am sure that a huge percentage of those permanent emigrants will return to their country, if they could travel when and as often as they liked. The economic input that would be received by this concept, would pulverize the loss of the 150 convertible pesos for the white card.

No, this is not the traditional discourse. Hand in hand with the pressing needs, spurred by the subsistence of the model, by too many distant causes of the breath of real democracy, but the truth is that Raul Castro is speaking a language that, if we strip it of its poor diction and its military tones, pushes us directly to a reasoning: it is the time for the fusion of ideas, not of negligence. It is the time of St.Thomas, not of Aristotle or Saint Augustine. It is the time of Jose Marti, not of Mario Diaz-Balart.

So I think it’s worth it to take a good look, shake out the cobwebs, if we really want to push the wall, to hasten the end of a story that has cost too many tears, too much blood, too much resentment, if we look closely it could be about to sink.

It is not the first time I sense, following Raul’s reforms, a relatively certain interest in returning to the country fragments of a hidden freedom, both in its economy and its idiosyncrasy. But it is the first time I suspect that through the hieroglyphics with which Raul has written his story in such a hurry, we can decipher better omens for a future without too much of the tendencies of the present.

August 8 2011

Creating a novel character based on his profile would be relatively simple. His birth name is Alejandro Cao de Benós, his adopted name is Cho Son-il (Korean for “Korea is one”), and he boasts the disconcerting title of Honorary Special Delegate of North Korea, which means that this Catalan with aristocratic roots is the official spokesman of North Korea abroad.

But his duties extend a little further.

His defense at all costs of the Kim dynasty since the beginning of the nineties and his solid and imperturbable activism outside the peninsula have earned Alejandro Cao de Benós the absolute confidence of the recently deceased dictator Kim Jong-il, such that he has ended up setting himself up as a kind of supreme national censor, to the point of deciding what information is transmitted from North Korea out to the world, and vice versa.

We are talking — as he himself has said in his own words — about the only Westerner to belong to the all-powerful inner circle of the most isolated and ferocious country in the world today.

This telephone interview, agreed to after the death of the “Dear Leader” (as all North Korea is obliged to call the late Kim Jong-il), hardly lasted twenty minutes. Mr Alejandro Cao de Benós answered my questions with a great deal of aptitude, although sometimes I wondered if he was responding to mine or someone else’s. At times his words did not even touch on the caustic issues which I was trying to investigate.

In any event it was, without a doubt, one of the most delightful interviews I have done to date. The martial tone of the dedicated Communist enamored of an ideology, his astonishing arguments explaining concisely why North Korea needs the atomic bomb more than food, provided me with twenty minutes of true journalistic surrealism with the man who, when he learned of the death of Kim Jong-il, confessed that it was like losing a father.

Hours after North Korean television announced the “terrible and irreparable” loss of the Dear Leader, a new leader appeared on the horizon. A 28-year-old leader baptized shortly earlier as “Brilliant Comrade”, unfamiliar even to many members of the innermost elite. I am speaking of Kim Jong-un, youngest child of Kim Jong-il. 

Ernesto Morales: Mr Cao de Benós, how is it possible that Kim Jong-un, a young man of 28 years of age whom not even you know, as you have hinted in other interviews, is henceforth the leader of 24 million people who did not elect him?

Alejandro Cao de Benós: It’s not quite like that. Comrade Kim Jong-un has a military position, is currently vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and has not been named leader. What’s happening is that he has received military instruction and is well loved by the Army, and there are many among the Korean people who are lending him their support and gathering around him.

That doesn’t mean that he will have absolute power over the Army or the country. That has never happened in North Korea. At present the leader depends on Mr Kim Yong-nam*, who is the President of the Supreme People’s Assembly. So we say: it is the hope of the Korean people that General Kim Jong-un continues the legacy of his father, General Kim Jong-il, but this doesn’t mean that he will make all the decisions or that he is in charge of the country right now.

In May 2001 the Dear Leader’s first-born son, and until then the clear heir of the dynasty, Kim Jong-nam, was arrested at Narita International Airport, in Tokyo. He was traveling on a false passport from the Dominican Republic, using a Chinese alias, and planning to visit Tokyo Disneyland. After spending a few days under arrest he was deported to China. The incident caused a diplomatic earthquake among North Korea, China, and Japan, and forced a shamed Kim Jong-il to cancel a trip to Beijing.

EM: Mr Cao de Benós, we understood that the first-born son, Kim Jong-nam, who you tell me will get the title of president, had lost the favor of Kim Jong-il, due to an attempt to illegally enter Japan in order to visit Disneyland…

ACB: Well, I am telling you that that information is totally false. What’s more, the Western press is creating a so-called Kim Jong-nam who doesn’t exist, who is this fat gentleman who appears on television, and who is in fact an actor paid by Japan. This man has nothing to do with North Korea.

Domestic and international tourism do not exist in North Korea. Nobody enters the country freely, and nobody freely leaves it. Not for any reason. In South Africa in 2010, North Korea took part in the FIFA World Cup for the first time. During the game against Brazil, attention was drawn to a large group of fans euphorically cheering on the North Korean team. Later it was discovered that they were Chinese volunteers hired by China Sports Management on the request of the North Korean Sports Committee. 

EM: So as it seems, Mr Cao de Benós, there is a very important factor in all of this, and it is the disinformation factor. I have read interviews in which you expressly state that one of the critiques the North Korean government could make of itself is that it doesn’t pay due attention to international relations, and especially with regard to the media. Now, you decide to a large extent what information comes out of and into North Korea.

Why can’t North Koreans leave freely to do what you do, to defend their great country from Western slander, and why can’t the rest of the world freely enter North Korea, and in that way get rid of the disinformation?

ACB: That’s the part of the self-critique which I try to resolve from my point of view. Bear in mind that I am a sort of bridge between the Western mentality and the North Korean mentality. I may be the only person who has the perspective of both worlds and what I try to do is bring them together.

But basically what goes on is that Korea has been continuously subjected to periodic slander and insults. For Koreans, respect, politeness, is something typical of their culture and is instrumental in society. While for example in America or Europe there are other types of characters, an individualistic society, where everyone says what he likes and on many occasions simply insults other people, this is unacceptable in Korea.

So since so much of the media has published so much false news, what North Korea has done is close itself off completely from the outside world. And that may be debatable but it’s understandable. When a person is unfairly injured, what he does is not allow anyone else to come into his house.

EM: It’s very important to be precise: a government is not the owner of a country. A government should simply administer a country according to the interests of its citizens, just to highlight the distinction with respect to your metaphor about access or lack of access to a house.

Now, there is an interesting point: International organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, defectors from the North Korean government itself, regular citizens who have escaped through China, they have all persistently denounced the concentration camps and human experimentation, the elimination of almost half a million political opponents in the last four decades, the torture, the disappearances.

The question most basic to common sense is: How is it possible that all these people are lying, how is it possible that hundreds of testimonies agree, while you do not allow the world to come into the country to check what are simple falsehoods?

ACB: Well, look, speaking specifically to allowing someone to enter your house or not, first I state explicitly to you that the government of North Korea is a government of the people, which is originates from the people and serves their interests, it is not a government of oligarchs or multimillionaires, OK?

As in other nations, the people feel united, otherwise this system would not continue. Bear in mind that the other socialist countries have increased the level of capitalism, as in the case of China, but North Korea and its 24 million inhabitants follow the same destiny even now and will continue along the socialist path. If the North Koreans decided to do the same as other socialist countries and turn toward capitalism, it would be a decision of the people itself which could materialize through democracy.

And responding briefly to your question, it’s because of false and malicious propaganda such as what you mention that every day Korea hardens itself more in its position of distance from a slanderous and aggressive West.

On 30 November of this year, Amnesty International reported the existence of at least six concentration camps in North Korea which hold more than 200,000 political prisoners. The largest of them, Yodok, imprisons around 50,000 people, including women and children. A report from 2006, commissioned by among others recently deceased former Czech president Václav Havel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, revealed chilling statistics: more than 400,000 people dead in North Korean prisons in the last 30 years. 

EM: So according to you there exists the concrete possibility of exercising a democratic opposition inside North Korea. Let’s suppose that I am a North Korean and I don’t approve of what’s happening in my country. Is there a viable possibility that I can express this publicly without anything bad happening to me?

ACB: Of course, just as in any other country in the world.

But really what I mean is that if anyone goes and sets foot in North Korea and meets North Koreans, he will realize that the government’s ideology springs from a popular basis. And what’s more, those organizations which have so much to say about North Korea, many of them have never set foot in the country, and if they continue to defame it, well, Korea will be much less inclined to invite them, because all they’re doing is attacking the country before getting to know it.

If I go into a country with prejudices, thinking I’m only going to encounter what I have read or the lies I have been told, then of course I won’t be able to understand that country.

EM: Mr Cao de Benós, we have seen reports, documentaries, even ones in which you appear, in which visitors and journalists are not allowed to freely ask questions of people in the street, to film North Koreans or talk with them, without your directing and dictating what segment of the population can be visited, which areas can be filmed and which ones not. And I have seen you specifically saying with all your authority: “You can’t film that.” How is this explained from a democratic perspective? Under what precept do you think that is appropriate for a country with freedoms?

ACB: Well, look, it’s very simple. That happened because the people whom I myself have brought (I deal with hundreds of journalists from every country in the world) sometimes come to inform but others come to make trouble. They come to defame.

So if a person who comes with a camera, and has entered the country thanks to my arrangements, and for whom I have arranged the visa, then arrives in the country and what he does is make trouble, break the law, logically I am not going to give him more leeway or more opportunities to keep causing damage, especially since I am responsible because that person has entered due to the confidence of our government in me.

There are other journalists who have had more access to the country, and it depends on the level of trust I have with them. Depending on how they behave, Korea responds to them accordingly.

EM: So filming an area which is not a military zone, filming a park or a town which you or the North Korean authorities don’t want filmed, is breaking the law…

ACB: It’s not quite like that. I’ll give you an example. I have lived and worked in the United States. In fact I was in the part of California, in one of the places with one of the highest costs of living. I was working there because in my original profession I was an I.T. consultant. When I was in Palo Alto, with, of course, the mansions and millionaires who live there, I realized that after 7 p.m., when the sun goes down, all the people who lived on the street came out, the homeless, the war veterans, the impoverished masses and the drug addicts. 

So, if I take a camera and film San Francisco during that time and only shoot those types of people, and I say that “this is San Francisco”, obviously that’s a distortion intended to give a poor image of that area…

EM: That’s true, but there’s a difference, Mr Cao de Benós: in San Francisco nobody is going to stop you from filming in complete freedom. And if anyone does, you can sue that person because he would be breaking the law. The law in this country is not “you can film here, but not there”. The law in a democracy is that there cannot exist someone with your authority, to determine what can be asked, photographed, or filmed, and what can’t.

ACB: That’s not the case. Every country has guidelines with respect to the media, and besides you can’t produce any show, either in the U.S. or in Spain, without a press authorization, and without press credentials.

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

EM: No, that’s not true. Nobody in the United States needs press credentials for those purposes.

ACB: Look, it even happens here in Spain. I’m telling you because I know all the journalists here. You can’t be filming the Ramblas in Barcelona with a camera without the needed authorization.

But look, all the same I’m not going to go into, I don’t have to go into such concrete details and talk about my very long experience with the media or the press, but I’ll just tell you that although you’re completely free to go all over the U.S., most people don’t go out into the street after 7:30 at night for fear of being assaulted. And besides if you don’t have a car, poor you, because it happened to me, not having a car in the U.S., having to resort to public transportation, and truly feeling afraid due to the urban insecurity you live through where you are.

Natural disasters and insane economic management destroyed the North Korean economy in the middle of the 1990s. According to estimates, the famine which then ravaged the country caused around two million deaths. In 1998 Doctors Without Borders reported cases of cannibalism among North Korean peasants, as the only way to overcome their hunger. Nevertheless, North Korea is one of just nine countries in the world which possess atomic weapons and boasts the fourth largest army in the world with 1.2 million men under arms.

EM: One last question, Mr Cao de Benós. It is well known in the world — I don’t know if you’re going to deny this too — that North Korea has a sizeable food shortage. In the past you have explained that this is simply the result of natural disasters which have ruined the fields.

All right, how is it possible that this can happen in a country which has nuclear weapons, which directs uncommon amounts of money to sustain the fourth largest army in the world, while people don’t have anything to eat?

ACB: Well look, it is explained in the following way: the main problem in North Korea is that if we don’t defend it from an empire like the United States, which has already destroyed several countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently Libya, if we don’t truly defend the country, it would lose all its museums, all its culture, and would end up basically being a wasteland.

In other words, if there’s no way to defend the country, its schools, its hospitals, its education, and any advances that have been made in the last fifty years would all be lost.

North Korea knew perfectly well that Bush reserved the right to launch a preemptive attack. We also knew that since 1994 Clinton had plans to attack North Korea, and if in fact that empire held back it was because we demonstrated that we had nuclear capacity.

So I tell you that since 1994 the United States has clearly wished to launch preemptive attacks, and if we didn’t have a large army it wouldn’t matter if we built hospitals, it wouldn’t matter if we had better tractors for farming, because they would all be annihilated by American bombers.

Therefore, now that we have ensured the strength of the country, now that we know the United States won’t attack us because we have a nuclear guarantee, we can develop the economy and develop the standard of living of the people to the needed extent.

(Special thanks to Dr Vilma Petrash for arranging this interview.)

Translated by: Adam Cooper

[*Translator’s note: The blogger spelled the name of Kim Yong-nam, President of the Supreme People’s Assembly, as Kim Jong-nam, the name of the eldest son of Kim Jong-il; this has been corrected.]

December 27 2011

On November 6, 2008, published my first digital article on the site Kaosenlared (Chaos on the Web). Three months earlier I had graduated in journalist at the University of the Oriente, did not have this blog, and was about to begin working at the radio station where I would be located during my Social Service. It wouldn’t be too long before Kaosenlared would censor the articles I submitted to their “Area of Free Publication,” and that I would be fired from Radio Bayamo… among other reasons, for articles like this one.

That first text on the web was titled, “We Too, Cubans Under 35,” (a title that today — it makes me smile to say so — I wouldn’t use even under torture). Its content, however, is still pleasing to me. And its fundamental protagonist, my compatriot Eliécer, still awakens the same admiration in me as when I sent these words into cyberspace.

Very soon I will write about the fabulous interview Eliécer Ávila gave to Estado de SATS. Today I want to introduce the theme with this extensive article (perhaps longer than it should have been: it was a cry of relief) which, at a distance of three years, I still subscribe to from beginning to end.

——————————————

We Too, Cubans Under 35…

(6 November 2008)

It has been some time since I read a text titled “We Too, Cubans Over 35” published on the site, Kaosenlared.

I venture to re-contextualize its title every time someone writes, opines, and debates the events surrounding the young Eliécer Avila, a 5th year student at the University of Informatics Sciences (UCI), who has become a kind of daily sport for those who follow the Cuban reality, whether from within or from outside the country, whether they are a militant within the Cuban Revolution or against it, and know a lot or nothing about what it means to live today, in 2008, on this Island.

For my part, I would I would like to start laying some foundation on which I base my opinions.

Eliécer Avila and I have a lot in common. I would dare to assert that without knowing each other in the flesh, it wouldn’t take five minutes of dialog for each of us to recognize the other as someone close, a brotherhood as if we’d been friends since childhood. The reasons I can explain are more or less as follows:

We are both from what is euphemistically known in the Cuban capital as “the interior,” and hence known in traditional and at times burlesque slang as the guajiros of this country — the peasants. For more details, we live in provinces located in the eastern part of the country: he in Puerto Padre, a town in Las Tunas, and I in Baymao, the capital of Granma province. The distance between our towns is about a three-hour journey.

Within a few months, Eliécer will probably graduate as an Information Engineer, while I, also in a few months, will get my degree in Journalism from the University of the Oriente, Santiago de Cuba.

But more important still, we both form a part of the same generation: he is 22, I am 24. Despite what he seems now, Eliécer has grown up literally in the countryside, developing a good physique and ideas pragmatic enough for the hard work of agriculture, and I have grown up in the semi-urban life of a provincial capital, involved more with artistic-intellectual tasks, but I can affirm that we are both products of the exact same educational system, the same social canons, and above all: we have both grown up under the influence of everything that has happened on this Island for the last 25 years.

Which means: we have suffered, while still children, the horrible economic crisis that came upon us in the early years of the ’90s, and although we weren’t as acutely aware of it, because of our young age, we knew that it wasn’t “good” that we didn’t have milk for breakfast, or toys, that we bathed without soap, and brushed our teeth without toothpaste. We knew that the bad moods, the irritability, that our parents exhibited most of the time wasn’t normal; we knew we had to sit at the table every night, eating what little had been cooked, under the light of candles because electricity was an unimaginable luxury.

Eliécer and I “came of age” as teenagers, students, at the time of the Battle of Ideas in this country, with the complex political process unleashed by the case of Elian Gonzalez. I can’t speak for Eliécer, but I venture to say that it is quite probable that he, as in my case, studying in the 10th grade in my High School of Exact Sciences, had to sit for hours on the floor of the hallways, along with 700 of my classmates, barely able to hear the speeches and interventions aired by Cuban televisions during the Open Forums. I repeat: not seeing it, barely able to hear it. We were so many for one television that to distinguish anything on the tiny screen was virtually impossible.

Worse still: when we ourselves had to form part of the public at these Forums we were taken from our schools to the town in question a day ahead of time. They took us there, at times, in falling-apart and poorly lit trains which, if they didn’t exude melancholy and sadness, it was only because they were transporting a mass of teenagers overflowing in adrenaline.

Once we arrived, we were “housed,” also on the floor, of schools, or institutions without rooms or bedrooms, huddled against each other, most of the time without water but with a symbolic snack in the morning, facing the endless speech of some fresh and well-fed leaders who harangued us about effort and dedication.

If, from our posts, we couldn’t smell the fresh lavender above, if we couldn’t take in the aroma of those who had recently bathed and lived with air conditioning, it was because we were so far from them in our plaza, there where the sun made our eyes water and exhaustion filled our vistas with images of grey.

And we grew up in these school with horrible food, horrible living conditions (mattresses, showers, bathrooms), destitute, studying difficult materials on empty stomachs with the tropical heat soaking our uniform shirts, worn and translucent from years of continued wearing.

I have heard Eliécer Avila, speaking boldly, referring to himself as “we who have studied, we who did everything right,” and I have felt the same sadness, the same excitement that he probably felt at the time. Why? Precisely for that reason: because we are “those who did everything right.”

We are the ones who endured the difficult conditions of the Cuban educational system, the standard of living of our population and, in consequence, the hardships of our parents barely able to support us in our education which is free only in theory; we are the ones who have chosen to be useful to society (he as an engineer, I as a journalist), instead of the so-called easy money, easy and sometimes dirty.

But then we come upon a paradox that is an open secret in Cuba: very little, if anything, helps us to be professionals. It’s useless, as in the case of Eliécer, a country boy who comes to a brand new school like UCI — The University of Information Sciences. If he wants to go to the university, prepare himself academically, have an objective for some possibility of bettering his quality of life in the near future, if he wants to prosper not just as a person but economically, and be useful to his society and be able to support himself and his family, then the best thing he can do in Cuba is to forget those studies and dedicate himself to thinking about how to subsist working for himself, which, by the way, faces him with another dilemma: how to gain an honest living, how to live comfortably without violating any law in this Socialist Country, is a utopia of the highest nature.

In the case of Eliécer, I think about the raising of animals that he insinuated in some comment. He knows, we all know well: the irony of our situation is that he can study, the doors of that and any Cuban university are open to him and to everyone who wants to hang a title on their wall, but his income would be notoriously greater selling pork at the local market, than serving his country as a licensed engineer.

Here, then, we see those who “have not done everything right.” And we see ourselves, young people like Eliecer, like me; those who populate the universities of this country. We see our “misguided friends” who choose to abandon their studies and dedicate themselves to the day-to-day, living from some shameful business or simply wearing a white apron and selling fritters from some corner of our town.

What is painful is that those friends greet us with respect, with admiration for our intelligence and intellectual level, and those friends are the same ones who pay for us to go to some nightclub, who give gifts to our family, who enjoy the many beauties of a country that we barely know.

We are the rising generation in this country, and it turns out that we are full of doubts. Of dissatisfaction. We are full of questions that no one takes the trouble to answer, and we know the reason is obvious, because they don’t have answers to them.

We are a generation that grew up just as our parents began to stop believing in words like Conscience and Selflessness because, in the 30 years under these slogans, they achieved little or nothing for themselves or their families

Needless to say, then, for us that fervor that flooded the plazas in the 1970s awakens only an anecdotal and distant interest. Young people like Eliecer and like me, and like so many thousands of Cubans — because we are “those who do things well” — have respected those who have faith in good intentions, but not because we are captive to the same effervescent rhetoric that filled our parents, and for which they broke their backs (or, as Eliecer says, “lost their teeth”) in voluntary work which, they thought, would create for us, their children, a more comfortable country.

That has been the development of our consciousness. So we have been shaped by this socialist Cuba. Thus, we have matured as thinking beings, who are offered all the possibilities in the world to excel, to develop our intellect, but who are then required not to use that intelligence to question the course our country has taken.

So, I was one of the countless who was surprised by the footage of what happened in that meeting at UCI. And to clarify: I am talking about the entire footage, which contained the intervention of Eliécer along with various others of his classmates, and the full answers of the President of the National Assembly of Cuba, Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada.

I must confess something: my feeling after seeing the intervention of this guajiro, of this neighbor of my territory, was basically envy. Although during his discourse I experienced various sensations (I laughed out loud several times, for sure), what I was left with at the end was a healthy envy, my only thought being to write an email to the student himself, saying what I had felt, as a Cuban like him, as a young man like him, and thanking him on behalf of those of us not in that room for what, in “good Cuban,” is called having the balls to be worthy of the ideals of Marti, to say what he really thought. That email was never answered. Today, after learning of the days of stress and analysis to which he was subjected, I understand that his silence was the result of strict orders.

But I speak of envy for one simple reason: Eliécer had the opportunity that thousands of us, thousands of young Cubans, have long desired, and what’s more, he took maximum advantage of it. He had the perfect opportunity not only to put on the record the many dissatisfactions we’ve held within, the many things we think are wrong with the society we live in and that we want to improve, but also to say it to Ricardo Alarcón, one of the respected figures in Cuban politics.

Apart from the countless interpretations and pros and cons that this event has given rise to, I dare to say something: “participatory socialist democracy” cannot be working very well in a country where there is such an uproar because some young person questions its leaders, and their decisions.

A people’s civil rights can’t be working very well if they are suddenly shaken from all sides, just because one voice suddenly arises in a meeting and “dares” to say “I don’t understand this, nor this, and I would like you, as president of the National Assembly of my country, to explain it to me.” We can be unsatisfied with the answers from Alarcón, but although significant they don’t seem to me to be the core of this issue: the reaction to this event that comes, not from “the enemy” this time, but from the Cuban people themselves, is the principal denunciation that something is not going well here.

Let’s say we put on the Internet a video of a French person questioning the government of Sarkozy; let’s say we publish material referring to the words of an Argentinian, or a Chilean, disagreeing with what happens in their nation. I would like to know how many inhabitants of those countries would go from house to house copying this material on the sly, reproducing it in their homes behind closed doors, and debating it in their family circles as the most important news of the day.

I don’t pretend to analyze in detail the responses that Ricardo Alarcón offered to that expectant student body. Everyone saw them, everyone heard them. They are, I believe, part of History. If I had to choose a fragment of his discourse as “the icing on the cake,” as an elixir of the unusual, I would pick the moment in which he argued that if the six billion inhabitants of the earth all decided to travel, “the aerial traffic jam would be enormous…” Let me quote a recurring phrase of Holden Caulfield, the character from Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye“: “That killed me.”

So it’s not about the nonconformist Eliécer. It’s not about creating a leader, nor manipulating his words to take greater advantage of them. The even more important fact is that at least one of the millions of Cubans who ever attended a meeting with a senior leader decided to express, at the most unexpected moment, all of what many of us just like him think, but that no one ever deigned to listen to.

We, Cubans under 25 who believe in the love of our country, who give thanks (as Rafael Sanzio did for having been born in the same century as Michelangelo) for having been born in the land of Martí, Céspedes, Agramonte, but also of Felix Varela, Capablanca, Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, we owe a hand to this son of peasants and to the peasant that he is himself, to this well-built guy with rough manners and the jocular ways of a native Cuban, for having fired the discordant starting pistol of those of us who do not think everything is fine, at a time and place where they only expected to hear the uniform music of the usual concert.

November 29 2011

To the already boiling cauldron that awaits Benedict XVI on the tropical island he will visit this coming March, another definitive ingredient has just been added: A too possible death. Unfortunately probable.

If it was complex to step on Mexican soil where, according to official figures, 47,515 people have lost their lives since Felipe Calderon declared the war on drug trafficking in 2006, at least the Pope had a countervailing reality: It’s a democracy. And in democracies, one can pray for the victims, call for peace, criticize the incumbent president. Without major complications.

It’s another kettle of fish when the papal visit makes landfall in the world of dictators. There, the world is turned on its ear, eyes are ready, as if at a fair, sniffing, questioning and observing how the saint conducts himself. And His Holiness knows that whatever he says or does not say will be urgently used by the dictators, or their detractors.

In the troubled reality of a country where hundreds of political prisoners cry out for justice from their cells; where women are beaten by unscrupulous police in uniform or in plain clothes; where too many controversial deaths have occurred in a couple of years (Zapata, Juan Wilfredo , Laura); is now added what could be a black harbinger of his visit, too shocking to be ignored by the Vatican: Wilmar Villar Santiago Mendoza, ready to die at any second.

The political opponent, sentenced to four years in jail for contempt, resistance and attack (yes, those euphemisms by which the Cuban Penal Code defines the act of public protest), is reported to be in very serious condition after more than 50 days on hunger strike, and according to testimony from relatives, “only a miracle could save him” from the terrible complications of pneumonia.

Miracles do happen, we know. But too sporadically. And if you’re not in the hands of the Pope — relying on his exalted credentials — to ask for a miracle for this poor Cuban on the verge of death, makes the labyrinth of Pope Benedict XVI, I believe, even more intractable.

Why? First, because if he finally meets the archaeological Fidel Castro, a symbolic leader with no official power today, there would be no justification not to meet with the Ladies in White or some of the dissidents who have asked for attention from the Papal Nuncio. I do not think that in just three days of hectic travel the 84-year-old man has time for both.

Second, because if it was already scandalous for a representative of universal peace and harmony to visit a country with one of the largest prison populations in the world, where political opponents have died in hunger strikes or in circumstances never clarified, and not to ask publicly and forcefully about them, it would be unforgivable to arrive in a country where only weeks before another dissident has died from a horrible hunger strike, and to remain silent.

The critical condition of Wilmar Villar Mendoza has given a brutal slap to the table where both sides receive his letters: on one hand the Catholic Church, with its absolute guide stepping on Cuban soil, and on the other the Cuban government represented by the evil alter-ego of Fidel Castro that is his younger brother.

Because the Vatican could announce without shame that its relations with the Cuban government have improved markedly in recent years, when even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her 2010 annual report on religious freedom in the world that Cuba had shown remarkable progress in this regard, and when 75 political prisoners were released thanks to the efforts of the church. But (unless the miracle asked for by Wilmar Villar Mendoza’s doctors takes place, I repeat) I do not think the Pope wants to carry the same eternal stigma that Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will carry, having visited the island when Orlando Zapata had just been buried, and having kept an embarrassing silence in this regard.

The families of the brave Santiaguan will be the only ones to weep with real pain if the end that they themselves, devastated, have predicted comes to pass. But for elementary practical opportunism, I don’t know who desires more that this young man — crushed by a hunger strike — recovers his health at the last minute: the satraps of my country, or Benedict XVI.

January 18 2012

Lionel Messi (Argentina, Barcelona FC) and Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal, Real Madrid)

When God is bored he repeats himself. Generates cyclical crises in the economy, identical natural disasters, literary characters called William Wilson in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. And creates suspiciously similar and symmetrical duets from time to time. As worldly amusements.

I think about this every time Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo appear on the same playing field, either before or after the kickoff, the background of hundreds of decibels generated by a match between their teams, and between them, the tension almost tangible, you can almost touch it, in a game where they match in egos, status and talent.

I look at them and think: the story of a Mozart and Salieri, capriciously transmuted to two men who make music with their feet. Not in an art, but in a sport.

What could be the unspeakable martyrdom of an elite player like Cristiano Ronaldo? Not to possess, today, the Golden Ball or the FIFA World Player? No. Let’s look further. To be player number two, shadowed by another name, the one who is spoken of as a complement, not as essence? So close, but no.

The personal drama of Cristiano Ronaldo, an industrial  Portuguese so media prominent, a factory to make millions and attract flashes, is to be the acolyte of a little, too-flamboyant star and at the same time, too vulgar. To say today that the Argentinean Lionel Messi, at 23-years-old, with his good-natured image is the best football player in the world, may sound facile. In fact it is.

But if we look at recent history, only in 2008, when the Portuguese Christiano seemed untouchable, and in an egocentric fit worthy of anthology said to the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, without his voice trembling, that he was “the first, second and third in the world,” everything takes a new twist.

The next year and the year following, he would no longer be.

I think of Cristiano like that Antonio Salieri portrayed in Milos Forman’s fabulous film, who secretly sniffed Mozart’s scores, enjoying with searing passion that inaccessible matter, too high, inhumanly sublime for his talent of a worthy, but mortal, artist.

Salieri himself did not understand how God had made such a terrible mistake of giving such an extraordinary gift, the unfathomable genius of the eternal, to a ridiculous character like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: uneducated, boorish, lacking the solemnity of creation.

Christiano’s face, put on a scale with Messi’s, could not inspire a more exact, more visceral envy, than that of the courtier Salieri.

Why Lionel Messi? Why is the player who is spoken of in irritating terms (not just the best in the world, but, horrors! the one pointed to by many players, authoritative voices, as the best of all time), why is he, it’s precisely that, well, such a little thing?

How is this so? Because inverting the sense of certain of Ronaldo’s own words: so short, so little. I piece of a man. A boy at odds with all glamor: no facial beauty, no physical beauty, no class. With the voice of a happy little laborer, who cuts short every sentence, and who must be pushed by the interviewers if they want to hear him say more than platitudes and little kitsch phrases.

Left: CR7: The moniker given to the sophisticated Portuguese striker of Real Madrid

Lacking charisma, not seeming to understand that he’s the third highest-earning athlete on the planet, who seems not to know that two hundred and seventy children’s clubs in Latin America have his name, and who is still showing he wants to be the scrawny kid who just wants kick the ball around the neighborhood. And nothing more.

If we add the ability to convert great goals, his ability to make destabilizing moves, we have a crack that moves the sports world at his feet.

But this fierce Lusitanian didn’t take something into account, known to be talented, enjoying it, looking down and savoring it. The best man in 2008 didn’t take into account, when it was said he was the first, second and third best in his sport: the silent presence, almost insignificant, of an undeniable genius, the kind that only occurs once every hundred years. As one Argentinean writer would say: because they tear the womb of Nature.

Right: Messi “the Flea”: Golden Ball in 2009 and 2010 and the FIFA World Player in 2009 and 2010

And it is not always that he breaks his own his records. The magic of him name comes, above all, from his way of playing. It is unique, an unrepeatable secret. The sense he gives the ball on the ground, the juggling, the impossible tricks, the joy with which he starts every play, whether it is frustrated or ends up in the goal.

Leo Messi plays like no one, scores like no one. According to Eduardo Galeano, writer and soccer maniac, he is the best of all because he still plays like a little kid in the neighborhood. And revels in it. Just does it. And if he misses, he suffers in silence: he doesn’t cry for the cameras, he doesn’t look for cover. At the same time, nor does he externalize happiness far beyond normal. Even with some of those goals for which some football idols and have coined a particular term: Playstation goals.

Because there is an immaterial particle, an atom higher and elusive, that separates the great men of real genius. There is something in a certain class of men — Miguel Angel, John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Capablanca — that distances them from those whom we admire, but who are rarely remembered through the centuries.

And that’s the tormented difference for a man of exceptional virtues like Cristiano, but distant — perhaps just by a step, a single damn step! — from the category of genius: he knows that this little drab-haired man will be remembered by world football fans, when he himself we be spoken of only in statistics.

Cristiano knows he is a man for the years, but not the ages. He knows that stripe is Roberto Baggio, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Fernando Redondo, David Beckham: unforgettable players. But that never, how hard he tries no matter how much he wants it, no matter how violent his fibrous body and scoring goals like a machine, as much as he is the “scorer” of the League, he could join other display names , residents of another shrine: Maradona, Pele, Di Stefano. He will not be a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. Time Magazine will not consider him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

What will it feel like, the number one, two, three Cristiano, when listening to legends such as Karl-Heinz Rummenige, Enzo Francescoli, Romario, and Maradona himself, saying quietly that Messi-the-flea is not just better today, but in the history of the sport, there has not been another like him?

What will he feel when they say that other cracks today, like Arjen Robben, Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney and Ronaldinho Gaucho, I say it again?

How to digest that the man who left the post of deputy, who has taken the last two gold balls, measuring seven inches less than him, unless it is the vigilance of advertisers who do not know how to sell his image deteriorated, and to top it off: he has cost 95 million euros less than him?

That is the acid data, that exclusivity adds ironies in the history of the elect: while the most celebrated club in the sport, Real Madrid, paid 95 million euros to Manchester United’s Portuguese striker, it is estimated that the FC Barcelona invested in Lionel Messi, since he became a child player at age 11, only 330,000 euros.

God is also often beautifully wicked, and builds legends worth speaking of: The parents of little Lionel should move from Argentina to the Catalan city, if they wanted to save his talent and even his life. At eleven years old he was diagnosed with a serious illness affecting his growth, so that he should be in Europe. It was the only way that the boy could grow normally.

For the minimum sum of $900 a month, the Barcelona Club paid for Lionel’s hormonal treatment: daily injections in both legs for three years. In this way, he entered for life the only professional club he has belonged to, the ties of gratitude to which bind him beyond what football, and from which it has managed to destroy all the hallmarks of previous legends.

While today’s clubs would be willing to shell out terrifying sums on this player, the team paid for Messi only through his treatment. Not a penny more.

The motto of the Cristiano is a futuristic spectacle: CR7. Like everything about him. His initials, and number. The motto of Messi, is also worthy of him: the flea. Just that. The magazine player versus the ugly duckling. The virtuous selfishness against modesty exacerbated. A refined Antonio Salieri that will not forgive his God for placing the sacred genius in Mozart’s trashy soul.

Cristiano knows that he desired by the fans, by the technicians. He knows he is feared by goalkeepers. But within him, a bitter taste, an imperceptible twinge pulses, pulses, pulses: he knows he is number two. And against that, there is no remedy. Especially when journalists make hay from his unbridled grief: when he is asked, mercilessly, by the raptors of the news: To you, is Leo Messi the best in the world? And he should say yes. Although he swallows the phrase. And even chews his assent, almost biting, with an indifferent expression in his eyes.

The two: one a machine player, the other player a rustic genius, Cristiano Salieri, Amadeus Messi, unknowingly staged an exciting and sinister plot, a script of impeccable suspense, in the mosaic of characters, secret poetry and vital energy, which is to play the ball. In what better way to define football, as there is none other than the mercies of God.

Translated by: Angelica Morales

May 11 2011

A little less than a year ago I lived for two weeks thinking I had cancer in my lymph nodes. In November, 2010, a team of pathologists at the “Carlos Manuel de Cespedes” Provincial Hospital in Bayamo signed a yellowish paper, prepared on a typewriter with a number of typing errors, telling me I had a Hodgkin lymphoma of the nodular sclerosis type.

The news was soon running like wildfire in a city of two hundred thousand people where my name, due to journalist-politician confrontations, had gained unfortunate notoriety.

Fifteen days later, another team of pathologists, these belonging to the “Hermanos Ameijeiras” Hospital in Havana, would make my mother let loose a flood of withheld tears, by telling us that opinion was nothing but a monstrous error.

The tests repeated in Havana on my lymph nodes showed an alteration (hyperplasia) which may have been the product of an ancient virus, which did not contain any sign of malignancy.

The diagnostics that would save me from the clutches of chemotherapy came after procedures as tortuous as a bone biopsy of the hip, a medullogram, and another nasal tissue biopsy (only practicable by introducing a kind of fine scissors in my nose to the larynx, and cutting a piece of tissue), from which I suffered for several days.

On returning to my eastern city, with another paper telling me that at age 26 I was not facing any cancer, never let me know what the five pathologist from Bayamo did or did not see when they determined that I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

That’s right: literature searches and dozens of questions to other physicians  let me know that these kind of lymphoma cells have a clear structure, well-defined, classical, which make any confusion very difficult.

I will never assert that behind an opinion that destroyed the nerves of my family and my friends, was the dark and powerful hand of the State Security, as several of those close to me asserted, alarmed at the inconceivable error. It is not my specialty to found my opinions on subjective bases, without arguments in hand: that is the specialty of the slanderers.

However, now that after the incredibly sudden death of Laura Pollan some well-known Cuban dissidents (Elizardo Sanchez, Guillermo Fariñas, Jose Daniel Ferrer, among many others) have signed a declaration of refusal to be hospitalized for illness, I find it impossible not to recall my own experience.

The national tragedy reaches such extremes of justified paranoia: when apparatchiks of State intelligence have the power to expel students from the University, to decide who can and cannot travel outside the country, to block a person from purchasing food at a supermarket, or entering a public movie theater; when these apparatchiks are present even in the most anodyne and least important institutions of society, why not believe their interests would also prevail in a hospital?

This statement of the Cuban Democratic Alliance, saying that only in case of emergency surgery do they want to be transferred to a “hospital of the regime” (read: all Cuban hospitals), and only if a doctor they trust tells them so, I believe represents one of the most terrible statements that could be known for a long time: not even in the medical system do the disaffected feel they have full rights.

Not even in a quasi-sacred ground such as health care, where professionals swear the Hippocratic oath to defend the lives of their patients at all costs, an area that should not ever yield to pressures or influences of any kind, not even there can Cubans who oppose the government can feel safe.

Yoani Sanchez once told me how the emergency medical attention she received at a clinic in Havana, was reported later, in minute detail, by a reporter who aired a television report against her.

Just as I will never know how much was error and how much was intentional in a diagnosis that ripped away a large part of my youth, it’s likely we may never know to what extent two deadly viruses entered the body of Laura Pollan naturally, if she was already infected with them, and whether they were really the cause of death of the Lady in White. That’s one of the many consequences of the obscurantism with which everything moves at the official level in Cuba.

But we do know a hard truth: the values of a society are too riddled with rot if even the responsibility, the incorruptibility of medical ethics must be distrusted by  those who disagree with government policy. With or without reason.

(Originally published in Martí Noticias)

October 20 2011

In the distance, a horizon of clouds promised to relieve the temperature. From my bicycle I felt the comfort ahead of time, even though my sweat was forcing me to squint to see the semi-deserted road. On my back a backpack, inside it a bouquet of flowers.

The pedaling became much easier. Before arriving at the cemetery, a short slope slipped the tires almost to the corroded and faded double iron doors that lead into the sacred ground.

Sacred ground: crass euphemism. The depression of the cemetery of my city killed the dead.

So I arrived there. It was a Thursday in 2010, almost three in the afternoon. I was not going to visit my dead. I went for those of someone else. Those of a stranger who, from Miami, sent me on plea with his lovely mission which I had to read only once before taking it on as mine:

“I have read your blog with great pleasure, I ass that you live in Bayamo, the same town where I was born and from where I left when I was six years of age. I have never returned. I would like to ask you an enormous favor, I don’t know if you will forgive my daring to do so. Somewhere in the provincial cemetery rest the remains of my aunt Amanda. She died in a tragic accident when she was less than twenty, before I was born. According to my elderly mother, her sister was the most beautiful girl in the Bayamo of her time. Her eyes adorn the homepage of my personal blog. Would it be too much to ask you to look for her grave and put flowers on it in my name, and send me a photo so I can see the site where someone so important to us rests?”

Two.

I had only a name beginning with “A,” the year of death and the approximate month of the funeral. “Mama doesn’t remember well, Ernesto, forgive me for burdening you even more with this task.” So my search relied on two and a half pieces of data and a mountain of good will.

I was lucky: I happened on the most solicitous employee of that sad place. Cemeteries usually infect the living with their effluvia. The employee, with a translucent shirt he had to constantly pull away from his torso, bathed in sweat, and with thick glasses, put a book in front of me that seemed to hold all the truths of this world, and of another, never better said.

“Turn the pages gently,” he warned me. “Remember it’s nearly 50 years ago. Get ready for the dust.”

And there I passed my next two hours. In a volume of almost five thousand pages, written in pencil, deciphering the hieroglyphics of hurried and disinterested letters, trying to find the exact date of the burial of a lady I had never known but who was very important to someone else, a stranger. Once we knew the date she entered the necropolis, we would know the street, row and pantheon where her remains reposed.

When, a couple of hours later, the employee returned from a room behind me with the stub of a cigar in his mouth, I got up with a piece of paper in hand and some satisfaction in my voice:

“Street 12, Row 308, Grave 44 L.”

Three.

The pictures took longer than expected. Standing before the rectangle of cement that covered — like a headstone — the grave of Amanda who never made it twenty, I found myself not knowing what to do.

How to send images of such a scary place, with stinking weeds surrounding the edges of the sepulcher, a bent and rusty tin cross adorning the head, a powdery dust announcing the state of abandonment of Amanda’s grave.

I cleaned it. I straightened the cross as best I could. Without any tools, aided only by my hands and will, I cleared the site of weeds run wild. I pulled the flowers from my backpack, put them in a reliquary filled with water. My sweat pasted my T-shirt to my body. Overhead the clouds darkened the sky announcing their danger: a downpour and me on a bicycle.

Nothing mattered.

The image of a distant family, an elderly woman eyes moist, honoring with her tears the site of her beautiful sister; the image of a stranger hugging his mother, thinking about his aunt and putting into context the abstraction of his mythical Amanda; the beautiful charge of my enterprise absorbed every second of the afternoon.

When I was sure that some thirty digital photos would allow me to choose which ones to send off electronically, which would offer the best panorama, the most comprehensive, the least depressing possible, I thanked the employee with a handshake that represented myself and those exiled from Bayamo, and began to pedal once again.

Four.

No, the infamous downpour didn’t damage the digital camera. I did damage the gears of the bike which, without grease, made a noise like grasshoppers for several weeks. But the photos were safe. If I could manage to connect myself to the Internet (with my clandestine connection), in a few minutes a stranger’s afternoon would change completely.

Five.

“Dear Ernesto:

“You made me cry. I have cried for happiness and little for the melancholy of several members of my family. I will never know how to thank you for your gesture. Right now I’m a little embarrassed, when I can tell you more you will receive the mail you deserve. I just want you to know that in Miami you have one more family.”

Epilogue.

On February 20, 2011, two months and twenty days after stepping on American soil, an article entitled “Uncomfortable Freedoms” appeared on this blog. It was my position on the American restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba — which months later I addressed in other texts — where I responsibly criticized the positions of Senators Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio.

The day after this publication, my wife received a brief message on her cell phone. I will try to reproduce it verbatim:

“I can not describe how disappointed I am Ernesto. Your article seemed to me the most hypocritical and lamentable that I have read in a long time. What a shame, having once been a true patriot.”

I smiled halfheartedly. I had just win something like an enemy, who would not hesitate in the future to employ offensive epithets against me from his patriotic and well-known blog, and between us was raised an impenetrable wall of political posturing.

I never got to know him. The lunch date set for some weekend never came to pass. I was sorry I wouldn’t get to kiss an old woman who kept intact her love for her dead sister, that I could not tell her in my own voice the details of the day when I humbly honored the memory of her Amanda.

I carefully conserve the memory of a sweaty Ernesto, determined to clean an unknown grave, excited at the thought of causing happiness in a distant home. And since then I have also conserved an almost absolute certainty: I am not disposed to believe in libertarian yearnings, in the search for the well-being of a trampled Country, from someone who is not capable of refining his own human condition.

10 January 2012

She said it with a tone somewhere between surprise and disappointment:

“They don’t give a damn, Ernesto. How mistaken we exiles are.”

And I nodded because I knew too well what she was talking about. For her, a woman from Santiago who hadn’t stepped foot on her native land since 1999, living in Miami and linked to the Hispanic media, it was a startling discovery.

For me, with my memory too fresh, it was just a description of a cadaver that I knew every inch of: the cadaver of Cuban freedom, seen through the lens of national apathy.

My interlocutor had returned the day before from her simmering and fun-loving Santiago. She went there more for a family emergency than for an excess of nostalgia or tourist reasons: her mother has lung cancer.

Her narratives of a country defeated by an army of the hungry, the ineptitude, the lack of productivity, the shortages and unsanitary conditions, fell into the background. She summarized it in two quick sentences.

Her real discovery, that which — I am sure — she would tell a hundred more people after me, was another:

“They are accustomed to living without freedom. Meanwhile, over here, we overestimate the “popular support” for the dissidents; over here we have the idea of a people in rebellion against their tyrants, people aware of the protests in the streets, the Ladies in White, the opponents of Palma Soriano, I didn’t find any of that over there…”

What did she find? A panorama that she seemed to be seeing again in front of me, image after image: a sweaty crowd, their carefree faces, moving their hips to the beat of reggaeton playing on the speakers. Hundreds of young people pressed tightly together, not to defend women from police beatings, but to buy the bad-smelling beer sold by the State. Arguments, at full throttle, hundreds of screams, not asking to be able to travel freely, not demanding freedom of expression and association, but rather discussing the latest baseball game between the Industriales and Santiago.

“When I asked them about the opponents of Palma Soriana who we’d seen dozens of times in the media in Miami, I almost always found the same reactions: indifference. This, in the best of cases. In the in-between cases: ‘These are shi..ters… they live to get beaten, total, they’re not going to change anything.’ In the worst cases, ‘The only thing they’re looking for is a visa to leave the country.’”

Inevitably, I recall the opposition I knew in my country: honest, consistent, serious. People who had paid a huge price for daring not to be two-faced. But I couldn’t help but think, also, of a certain little up-and-comer in a youth opposition party in my city who, after my expulsion from the mass media, wanted to “hire” me to teach journalism to the ten members of his group. What was the attraction that “freedom fighter” found to tempt me with his offer?

“You give us some little classes, which you can, and I will immediately sign a certificate saying you are politically persecuted and have collaborated with the dissidence. With this and your own history, you’ll be in la Yuma — the U.S.A. — before you know it….”

I still check my conscience regarding whether I was too hurtful in my response.

But what I don’t doubt is the God’s truth: The romantic enthusiasm that permeates certain circles outside Cuba, that constant feeling of the epic of a people in struggle against their oppressors, this perspective of society that has closed ranks in search of its rights; it is a beautiful view, but false.

Cuba has eleven million souls. Ivonne Malleza is one. José Daniel Ferrer is one. The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation is Elizardo Sanchez. Bloggers truly active in the struggle don’t exceed ten. Yoani is one. Dagoberto is one. Biscet is one. The courageous protagonists who protest by banging on pots and pans in the Cuatro Caminos markets and who protests in Fraternity Park never exceed five, always surrounded by fifty, a hundred, impassive observers who do not move a finger to fend off the thugs.

I want them to be more. There were not ninety Ladies in White scattered throughout the country, but there were at least ninety thousand that should have been. I wish that the nine million Cubans who affixed their signatures  (signatures infected with fear and apathy) in 2002 to guarantee Socialism in the Constitution of the Republic, would have added more of their names to the Varela Project, which that same year collected eleven thousand real names. I wish that one day the crowd would be reversed, and that the handful of those cornered, encircled by the crowd, were not Laura Pollan and her women, but rather the tools of the system surrounded by brave Cubans. But my desire is not enough.

We Cubans crush the larvae under military boots, and as Kant warned, “Whomever voluntarily turns worm should not protest if they decide to trample him.” Two million of us have escaped. Eleven million remain inside. Half of those eleven million also want to escape. Of the other half, the majority watch the bulls from the sidelines and wait for better times. They subsist. A much too small minority don’t want to escape, nor are they resigned to living without freedom, They are almost as few as the family that has taken over the whole Island, and that will drift away only when all its members are already dead.

So brief is the recent history of my country. In a cruel paragraph one can put tons of words, books, frustrations, desires, longings.

I think it’s time to take off our masks and look at our wrinkles in the mirror: The Castros won. They will die in power. They will yield when it pleases them, or when it pleases biology. And the millions of Cubans (unmotivated at present) in the public plazas every May Day, the hundreds of Central Havanans congregating in front of the homes of the disaffected to launch repudiations, insults, blows, and those who looked with amazement at my friend, a woman from Santiago who thought she would find her countrymen at war and found them at a party, they are the undeniable trophy of the winners.

January 4 2012

If somehow I managed the unthinkable — five minutes with president Barack Obama — I think I would use the time to convey a clear message: “Do not veto the provision that restricts travel and remittances to Cuba, Mr. President.”

I don’t know if I would say to him what I have to my friends and family in Cuba, and which in my year in the United States I’ve never stopped repeating, with impertinent insistence, that to alienate Cubans on and off the island from each other is more than an injustice, it is a serious mistake.

But I would advise the President not to veto, in the case of Cuba, the budget bill that will be approved or rejected by Congress on the 16th, where the Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart cleverly slipped in a return to the Cuban travel and remittances policies from the time of George W. Bush.

Why? Because just as every people has the leader it deserves, each sector of a democracy has the measures it deserves, promulgated by the legislators it elects and deserves.

And while Obama’s veto would avoid the catastrophe of severing the ties between exiles and Cuba’s nascent civil society, and would prevent more than a little suffering among mothers who would not be able to see their children more than once every three years, I don’t believe it should be Obama, an American born in Hawaii, who should protect us from whomever we Cubans ourselves elect, or allow others to elect, and who eventually adopt laws against us.

Only those who cannot exercise their right to vote because they do not possess citizenship in this country are excluded (temporarily) from the blame. The rest of those in South Florida have signed on so that those with positions like those of Mario Diaz Balart seem representative of this community, and those who prefer to go shopping on election day will receive what they appear to have asked for, whether or not they exercised their rights.

The truly unfortunate are the almost two million Cubans living in the United States today, and the 1.2 million living in South Florida, an ever smaller percentage of whom sustain these alienating postures and restrictions that in more than half a century have not hurt so much as a hair on the head of the Castro brothers.

But it so happens that the true majority now has its hands tied because of one of two reasons: either legal impossibility or apathy toward the exercise of its rights, incorrigibly inherited from its days on an Island where the word “elections” has no mental resonance.

So who is left? Those who because of stubbornness, ignorance, lack of re-programming or opportunism insist on supporting a clearly failed policy, based more on the absence of ideas than on the dialectic of thought and societies.

That explains why it is not imperative to have an intelligent and bold platform in the south of Florida in order to have a rising political career; if you repeat the same chants, the same anti-Castro formulas, the same methods that have proved ineffective decade after decade, you’re more than halfway along the path to success.

It doesn’t matter that every day the facts prove that without the people who travel to the Island the cellphones don’t bring themselves and, in consequence, the images of repression cannot be shown to the world. It doesn’t matter that those like me who are newcomers shout ourselves hoarse saying that every Cuban who receives financial support outside the State is a much more independent and honest citizen than those who depend on the government to fill their stomachs. It’s not important to remember the basis on which this great country is founded: respect for diversity and individual decisions.

Therefore I, who advocate for all those who want to visit their family and friends being able to do so whenever they and their wallets decide (not the amendment of some congressman born in Fort Lauderdale, lucky for him), would applaud the president’s veto in the name of the consequences it would avoid, but if the man elected to decide the fate of this nation asked my humble opinion, I would repeat the same sentence: “Don’t veto the clause that restricts travel and remittances to Cuba.”

As long as there is no accountability and good sense on the part of Cubans in the exercise of their rights; as long as there is no awareness of what it means to elect those who promote policies respectable in their quest for freedom but that should be dismissed as outdated, there will be draconian laws governing the destiny of this community, and we say: welcome to the past.

I don’t believe it should be the president of the United States who, like a wise adult, makes the right decision in the name of the children.  Rights come with responsibility, they are not received as an indulgence.

(Originally in Martí Noticias)

December 14 2011

With just one click from his holy finger, he lit the most colossal Christmas tree in the holy world 220 kilometers from his holy dwelling. So says the Guinness Book of World Records: the tree rises 750 meters up the side of a mountain in Gubbio, Italty, and is a record And this tree was lit by Benedict XVI from Rome using a $500 Sony Tablet.

Thousand of my readers who are engineers could explain the mystery to me: how to implement a mechanism that, via satellite, lights far off bulbs with the single touch of a button on an electronic tablet. But one thing I do know from my own common sense: This mechanism is expensive. In spades.

His Holiness saw the result of his click on a modern LCD wide-screen TV. Perhaps he saw the image and thought to himself: “At this point, making miracles is a little bit easier.”

If he changed the channel and put some of the cameras in the Vatican, he could also see the Christmas tree that he ordered for the House of God, which will be lit this coming December 16th: it is a fir tree 5.6 meters high brought from the Ukrainian region of Zarkapattie and ornamented with 2,500 figurines in gold and silver.

This is not the most fascinating thing. That is what happened three days earlier, on December 4th, from his balcony facing the Plaza of St. Peter: the Holy Father exhorted his faithful to practice austerity this Christmas.

During the recitation of the Angelus, Joseph Ratzinger said that the Lord, “of riches he became poor for your sakes and he will make you rich through your poverty,” and he remembered the humble John the Baptist, whom Jesus himself admired above all those who “lived in the palaces of kings and wore luxurious clothes.”

When the absurd is too grotesque, there is only one reaction: silence. Perhaps a little introspection. For my part, I would dare to ask something of the advisors — or whatever one calls them — of Benedict XVI in these days of prayer and rejoicing: that they tell the Pope, if he ultimately goes to Cuba in March of this coming year, it would be a good idea to sell the Sony Tablet beforehand.

I know that the tithes only go from the faithful to the Church, never the reverse, but with $500 he could feed a lot of the mouths of my people, and by this date Christmas 2.0 will have already passed.

December 8 2011